Before You Upgrade To iOS 10 Or An iPhone 7 You need to do this

What if you get home later today, throw your iPhone on the charger, and tell it to go ahead and upgrade to iOS 10.

You walk away, go for a run, make some dinner, and wait for the new shiny to download. But, when you come back, instead of there being a cheery “Hello!” on the screen, there’s the dreaded Lighnting cable and iTunes icon combo. Something went wrong and you have to restore your phone. You grumble your way over to the computer, plug it in, and your stomach sinks.

Or, what if you’re at the Apple AAPL +2.54% Store on Friday and you “Yes. Mmm-hmm.” your way through all the Apple rep’s questions so that you can trade in your old iPhone 6S for an iPhone 7. After they take away your old device, unwrap the iPhone for you (which, c’mon, why won’t they let us do that…unwrapping is my favorite part), and hand you your new activated iPhone, you start finalizing the activation process. You’re a couple of screens in when you stop and start muttering expletives.

What do both of these scenarios have in common? When you got to the part of the process where you had to restore your iPhone from backups, you realized you did not have a recent image.

If you use iCloud, this isn’t quite the heart-stopping affair that it used to be. Your documents and photos will be backed up to iCloud and will get pulled back down when you restore. But any recent rearranging of your Home screen, or added widgets, or, most importantly, Messages, will be completely lost. If you don’t have a backup at all, you could easily lose hours restoring your iPhone back to its previous state.

Unless your Last Backup was just a few minutes ago, click that button! (Image Credit: Anthony Karcz)

So before you upgrade your OS or get a new phone, pop open that Settings icon, go to iCloud, scroll to Backup, and click Back Up Now (and if it’s not turned on…do that too!). If it fails, make sure you have a solid WiFi connection. If your connection isn’t the issue, in iCloud settings, scroll to the top and select Storage. Select Manage Storage if you’re out of room and see what you can prune out. Sometimes you have to manually delete old, incomplete backups before you can create a new one. Keep in mind that backups can sometimes take fifteen minutes or more, depending on if it’s a fresh backup or if there’s a lot of new data on your phone.

It may seem like a hassle; but when you get your phone restored and it’s exactly as you left it (just with upgrades), it will be worth it.